by Bret A. Fausett

New Architect
March 2003

Have you paused lately to give thanks to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or cheers for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)? I have. I keep a file of important Internet-related legal filings and decisions. Looking through it recently, I was taken with how much of the material relates to the work of the RIAA and the MPAA.

These two entertainment industry associations are responsible for raising most of the important Internet-related legal issues of the last five years.

It wasn't too long ago that lawyers were debating whether "Internet law" even existed. In the mid-1990s, the University of Chicago Law School hosted one of the first conferences on the emerging "Law of Cyberspace." Judge Frank Easterbrook gave the keynote address, intriguingly named "Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse." The eager conference attendees didn't have to wait long find out exactly what that meant. Shortly after taking the podium, Judge Easterbrook told his listeners that there was no more a "law of the Internet" than there was a "law of the horse." In other words, new mediums don't create new ways of thinking about legal issues. Judge Easterbrook took the view that judges and juries apply existing legal frameworks to whatever facts they are presented, even when those facts involve something completely new like the Internet.

In his celebrated retort, "The Law of the Horse," Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig contemplated what a law of cyberspace might actually look like and what lessons it might provide. The Lessig view, that Internet law might actually exist and say something important about time, place, and national boundaries, was welcomed by those who were thinking about the intersection of law and technology.
  Day of Defeat Online Gaming

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